Capcom aims AI at the slow work of making Resident Evil-scale games

On a game the size of Resident Evil, even simple tasks can become extremely time consuming, according to The Verge's account of Satoshi Ishida's talk ^[3]. Ishida gave the cause: games and their assets have grown much larger, and development takes longer as a result ^[4]. The solution, he said, is "successfully integrating AI technology into development workflows" ^[5].

Engadget's summary is that the AI would mostly help streamline those workflows ^[8]. The people who will use REX are Capcom's own developers, since RE Engine is the company's proprietary engine ^[1].

The roadmap language goes further than a faster tool. In IGN's translation, quoted by The Verge, Ishida described building toward "a future where we create games together with AI" ^[14]. Engadget, drawing on GameBiz and IGN, gives the engine's goal as a "game engine of the AI generation" ^[2]. Shorter workflows are a promise about how long a task takes. Creating games together with AI puts the AI inside the making of the game. That phrase sits closer to the line Capcom drew for shareholders, when it said AI-generated content would stay out of its games ^[9].

In my view, what matters to the developer using the engine is whether a task they repeat got shorter. I'd put AI in the pipeline first, as Capcom says it will ^[8]. The tradeoff is that customers never see pipeline gains, so the gains show up on the record only if someone timed the work before the tool arrived.

A team adding AI to its own production can sort the decision with two questions, answered in writing. The first is whether the AI output ships to the customer or stays in the tools staff use. The second is whether anyone timed the task before the tool arrived. Pipeline tooling with a baseline is easy to justify, because the hours saved can be shown. Without a baseline, the spending can't be measured either way. Shipped AI output, measured or not, is a content-policy decision that needs an owner, and it is the corner Capcom has said it will stay out of ^[9]. On the reported record, REX sits in the pipeline column, and neither report includes a target for time saved or a date for finishing the rebuild ^[11].